Carrying a bookshelf of Bibles in your pocket

We are approaching one of the two times of the year when many people who do not ordinarily attend church nonetheless get up and take themselves in. It seems appropriate, therefore, to look at a few options for e-books to use in church. It should go without saying that a book the size of the Bible is one of the best arguments for having an electronic version that you can keep in your hip pocket.

There have been previous attempts to create such a Bible, of course, such as the Franklin NIV-570 electronic NIV Bible pictured at left and its King James sibling. But in the age of the e-book device and the iPhone, we can do better than that—and at $42-$50, we can certainly do it for less money.

First, I will cover true “e-books”—books that you download entirely to your device and can take with you anywhere. Then I will look at a couple of useful multiple-Bible-version websites.

Public Domain Bibles: King James, Douay-Rheims, World English

There are several editions of the Bible that are in the public domain, and can be downloaded in multiple formats from such sites as Manybooks, Munsey’s, or Project Gutenberg. These are the King James, Douay-Rheims, and World English Bibles.

The King James is probably the best known English Bible version. It has been used for decades by the Gideons, who leave them in hotels and give out pocket-sized New Testaments. The language is somewhat archaic, but understandable, and there are a number of better, more recent translations, but there are a number of churches that still use the King James version only.

(But not everyone is so trusting of it, of course. I am reminded of the example of a friend of my father’s, who was trying to win a woman over to Christianity, and happened to mention the King James Bible. The woman said, “Oh, I don’t put any faith in that version at all. I mean, what did King James know about the Bible? He was just some old king!”)

The King James Bible can also be installed as a command-line Linux application, for those who use Linux and the command-line. Here’s how to do it in Ubuntu. The application allows easy (for those used to the command-line) word-searching and building lists of citations.

Douay-Rheims is a translation from the Latin Vulgate that actually pre-dates King James. Though other versions are commonly used by Catholic churches today, Douay-Rheims is still used by Traditionalist Catholics in much the same way as traditional Protestant churches use the King James.

The World English Bible is a more recent public-domain translation, based upon the 1901 American Standard Bible. It was begun with the goal of having a public domain Bible that could be printed and given out free without the archaic language of the King James.

All these Bibles are available for free download at places like Project Gutenberg or Manybooks.net. Fictionwise and eReader also have versions of the King James available in Multiformat for $2.50 for the New Testament and $2.99 for the old (with standard discounts and rebates applying). While it might seem odd to pay for a public domain e-book, what you are paying for is the professional formatting that went into making these files. If you plan to use the KJV a lot, or simply like the feature set of the eReader client, it is probably worth the small amount of money to get a pro-polished version.

eReader and Fictionwise also offer a number of copyrighted newer Bible translations—the NIV (New International Version), Today’s NIV, and others.

I have the Secure eReader version of the NIV, which I bought several years ago. The NIV is a very decent recent Protestant translation, which presents the Bible in easy-to-understand language without sacrificing the poetry and meaning of the original.

At 2.5 megabytes, the NIV is a rather bulky book. Back when I purchased it, it took up a pretty hefty chunk of my Visor Deluxe’s 16-megabyte memory cartridge. Now, of course, it takes up the same amount of space as a single two-minute song on my 32-gigabyte iPod Touch. All hail Moore’s Law.

The table of contents is very clear, and there is a list of links at the beginning of each book to every chapter in that book. The text is all there, all complete, all quite readable in either the desktop client or the iPhone eReader client. And I remember it being just as readable in the Palm client as well, back when I had a Palm.

However, this is not to say it is without its problems. One possible problem is the lack of red text to highlight Jesus’s speech. Back when this Bible was issued, most e-reading devices were black and white anyway, and eReader really doesn’t have the tech to do multicolored text easily even for devices that are color. Of course, this is relatively minor, in the grand scheme of things.

Another minor problem, from my perspective, is that it is encumbered with DRM—but I have never found eReader’s DRM to get in my way of using books locked under it. Others’ opinions on this matter may vary.

The other problems are a bit more severe.

Keep Feeling Pagination

One of the features of the eReader application, on any platform, is that whenever anything is done to change the size of its screen-pages (widening the screen on the desktop, flipping the device from portrait to landscape for the iPhone/iPod Touch, changing the font size), it has to go through and generate a new pagination scheme for the entire book at once. Until that is done, you can’t move to any page it has not paginated yet.

For a book the size of your average paperback, this is over in a minute or so at most, even on the slowest Palm. For the entire Bible, the process can take five to ten minutes. If you buy any version of the Bible for eReader, you should make sure you have the pagination you want before getting in a position where you might need to use the Bible.

Footnotes are Not Fingernotes

Another problem has to do with the footnotes in the NIV. The NIV has copious footnotes—usually offering either an alternate translation of the verse in question, or a citation of an Old Testament verse being cited by the speaker. These links can easily be brought up in the desktop eReader client, or on palmtops that use a stylus to tap specific points on the screen.

However, they are in little teeny tiny superscript letters, and I have never yet been able to tap precisely enough on one of them with my finger to bring it up in the iPhone eReader application. This is not precisely a book-breaking bug, but it does render a bit of annoyance here and there.

[Note: Since this article was originally written, eReader has come out with a new version that makes footnotes considerably easier to open in the iPhone reader.]

Still, for someone who can afford it and wants a modern translation, you could do worse than to get the NIV, or some other eReader-based Bible.

For people who lack the space for carrying around Bible e-books, or who would like to have access to a wider variety of tools and resources, there are a number of websites where those resources can be found. If your church has wireless Internet (as does mine), prepare to wow them at Sunday school with the ability to check Strong’s Concordance or compare several different translations on your tiny little hand-held box!

Blue Letter Bible

The Blue Letter Bible is a scholarship-focused Bible site, with access to a number of versions (mostly English, but one Spanish) of both public-domain and copyrighted Bibles (including the KJV and NIV). The verses are presented one by one—for ease of looking up citations, commentaries, concordance listings, and so forth for a given verse—rather than grouped into paragraphs for ease of reading.

The BLB has an immense and valuable collection of scholarly resources, treatises, commentaries, even medieval engravings representing events from particular Bible verses. If you want to look like an expert and dominate your Sunday School classes, I know of no finer place to start your research.

User-Unfriendly Interface

The downside to the site is that it really needs Jakob Nielsen or some other usability guru to come in and take a look at it. There are all these little buttons to the left of the verses, but no handy on-page reference to explain what they are.

You actually have to dig into the Help/FAQs to find out what the little buttons to the side mean. And even then, in the “How to Use the Blue Letter Bible” guide, only five of them are explained (you have to look somewhere else to find out what the “D” button is). Very sloppy.

Also, its focus on scholarship means that it is less useful if you are looking for a version just to read.

Bible Gateway

Bible Gateway is another multi-Bible site, but this one has a focus on easy readability and cross-version comparison rather than verse-by-verse scholarship. Unlike the BLB, many of Bible Gateway’s versions are grouped into paragraphs for easier reading. Some of its versions have recorded readings, so passages can be listened aloud as well as read.

Bible Gateway has many versions of the Bible, in a number of languages. English versions include the NIV, TNIV, New International Reader’s Version, Original and New King James versions, and many others. It offers the ability to view passages from up to five versions simultaneously for easy comparison, as well as descriptive introductions to each version that explain how and why it was created.

Those with spider-style e-book creators, such as iSiloX or Plucker, could easily create offline e-books from the BibleGateway books simply by pointing their program at the index page for a given version. However, this would be a violation of copyright on some of the versions, and would-be downloaders would be well-advised to check the copyright notice for a given version before they do so.

Bible Gateway is the site I like to use at my church on my iPod Touch, which thankfully has wireless Internet access. The page design is clean, spare, and very readable, even on a small-screened device like the iPod. It is not overloaded with graphics, so is quick to load and render. If you have Internet access (either wireless or through an iPhone cell connection), this site will give you lots of versions to compare and discuss in Sunday school.